# WALT: Web Agents that Learn Tools

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01524 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01524/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 31 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01206/) (2022)
- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07972/) (2024)
- [GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01614/) (2024)
- [WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13919/) (2024)
- [Agent Workflow Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07429/) (2024)
- [WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07718/) (2024)
- [Set-of-Mark Prompting Unleashes Extraordinary Visual Grounding in GPT-4V](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11441/) (2023)
- [Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08802/) (2018)
- [Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04454/) (2024)
- [WebRL: Training LLM Web Agents via Self-Evolving Online Curriculum Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02337/) (2024)
- [Agent Q: Advanced Reasoning and Learning for Autonomous AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07199/) (2024)
- [SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07079/) (2025)
- [An Illusion of Progress? Assessing the Current State of Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01382/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Web Navigation with Instruction-Finetuned Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11854/) (2023)
- [Is Your LLM Secretly a World Model of the Internet? Model-Based Planning for Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06559/) (2024)
- [Tree Search for Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01476/) (2024)
- [Inducing Programmatic Skills for Agentic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06821/) (2025)
- [MCP-Universe: Benchmarking Large Language Models with Real-World Model Context Protocol Servers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14704/) (2025)
- [WorkArena++: Towards Compositional Planning and Reasoning-based Common Knowledge Work Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05291/) (2024)
- [Beyond Browsing: API-Based Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16464/) (2024)
- [Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11357/) (2025)
- [VLM Agents Generate Their Own Memories: Distilling Experience into Embodied Programs of Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14596/) (2024)
- [TongUI: Internet-Scale Trajectories from Multimodal Web Tutorials for Generalized GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12679/) (2025)
- [Build the web for agents, not agents for the web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10953/) (2025)
- [AWorld: Orchestrating the Training Recipe for Agentic AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20404/) (2025)
- [Let's Think in Two Steps: Mitigating Agreement Bias in MLLMs with Self-Grounded Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11662/) (2025)
- [A Functionality-Grounded Benchmark for Evaluating Web Agents in E-commerce Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15832/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [A Survey of Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models: Towards Recursively Self-Improving and Collective Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12538/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Agent Memory in the Second Half: Towards Self-Evolving and Long-Horizon Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06052/) (2026)
- [WebXSkill: Skill Learning for Autonomous Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13318/) (2026)
- [Why Do LLM-based Web Agents Fail? A Hierarchical Planning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14248/) (2026)
- [Evolving Programmatic Skill Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03509/) (2026)
- [SAGE: Training Smart Any-Horizon Agents for Long Video Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13874/) (2025)
- [Terminal Agents Suffice for Enterprise Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00073/) (2026)
- [On the Fragility of Self-Improving Agents: Variance, Task Order, and Underspecification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18066/) (2026)
- [Do Enterprise Systems Need Learned World Models? The Importance of Context to Infer Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12178/) (2026)
- [PANDO: Efficient Multimodal AI Agents via Online Skill Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24785/) (2026)
- [Beyond Domains: Reusing Web Skills via Transferable Interaction Patterns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17645/) (2026)
- [Falsifiable Commitment Planning for Self-Correcting Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24167/) (2026)
- [AutoTailor: Automatic, User-Aligned Capability Selection and Adaptation for Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13548/) (2026)
- [Probe to Act: Elevating Browser-Use Agent via Active Visual Probing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33646/) (2026)
- [SpatialSkill: Self-Evolving Skills for Cross-View Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34124/) (2026)
- [CLIFT: Conformal Self-Verification for Web Agent Training and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06829/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Web agents promise to automate complex browser tasks, but current methods remain brittle -- relying on step-by-step UI interactions and heavy LLM reasoning that break under dynamic layouts and long horizons. Humans, by contrast, exploit website-provided functionality through high-level operations like search, filter, and sort. We introduce WALT (Web Agents that Learn Tools), a framework that reverse-engineers latent website functionality into reusable invocable tools. Rather than hypothesizing ad-hoc skills, WALT exposes robust implementations of automations already designed into websites -- spanning discovery (search, filter, sort), communication (post, comment, upvote), and content management (create, edit, delete). Tools abstract away low-level execution: instead of reasoning about how to click and type, agents simply call search(query) or create(listing). This shifts the computational burden from fragile step-by-step reasoning to reliable tool invocation. On VisualWebArena and WebArena, WALT achieves higher success with fewer steps and less LLM-dependent reasoning, establishing a robust and generalizable paradigm for browser automation.